Sadness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Because thrilling turn-ons are often fueled by conflict and ambivalence, they are frequently the most difficult to change, particularly if painful or traumatic experiences are woven into them. As we become aware of how our turn-ons are linked to unpleasant memories, we can begin exploring more fulfilling, less conflicted erotic styles. Unfortunately, these more comfortable expressions of eros typically involve a distinct reduction in sexual intensity, an intensity that will be sorely missed. Ryan Revisited: Excitement lostEver since his father caught him playing with himself, Ryan had been at war with his sexual urges, a battle that had not only taken an enormous emotional toll but had also provided an inexhaustible source of risqué fascination. When he fell in love with Janet he was forced to face the fact that love and lust had long since become so thoroughly incompatible that he was unable to generate sufficient excitement with Janet to trigger an orgasm. Ryan’s therapy progressed rapidly. He discovered that struggle was the fuel for his compulsive urges and that calling himself a “sex addict” only amplified his conflict. Gradually, because he loved Janet, he freely chose to step away from his “affair” with porn shops and phone sex, concentrating instead on the novel experience of sex with a woman he cared about. He and Janet experimented more freely with sensuality and affection, and both enjoyed a deepening closeness. In response to this progress Ryan fell into depression. “It makes no sense,” he lamented. “Everything is going so well, yet a cloud follows me wherever I go. Everything is flat and colorless.” As much as Ryan appreciated his relationship with Janet, he also missed the passion of the raunchy sex he had spent a lifetime both fighting and pursuing, the sex that he had always counted on to distract him from unpleasant emotions. Although reluctant to admit it, Ryan was in mourning. As it does for so many people in his situation, Ryan’s growth stalled until he granted himself permission to recognize the depth of his attachment to forbidden lust. He needed to respect the lost rewards—not just the suffering—of the eroticism he was leaving behind. THE PAIN OF LOST HOPESAs you’ve frequently seen, problematic sexual patterns evolve to compensate for unmet needs or to soothe unhealed psychic wounds. One reason troublesome turn-ons are so tenacious is that they express an enduring hope that all can be made well and whole. To some degree, sexual reenactments shield us from the distressing reality that in emotional life what is lost can never be regained. When you alter an unfulfilling erotic pattern, you might begin to feel, more intensely than ever before, the emotional pain that your CET was originally designed to soothe. Understandably, you might shrink from that sting, choosing instead to endure the dull ache of the status quo. Yet, paradoxically, when you allow yourself to feel your pain fully, you free yourself from it. It is the acceptance, not the denial, of hurt that heals us.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  When the pain and the suffering were caused by others—by how they felt about others, by how they perceived others to feel about them—or when the pain was caused by considering their own conditions, such as confronting the inevitability of death, humans would have drawn on their expanding individual and collective resources and invented a variety of responses that ranged from moral prescriptions and principles of justice to modes of social organization and governance, artistic manifestations, and religious beliefs. — It is not possible to tell exactly when these developments would have taken place. Their pace varied significantly depending on the specific populations and their geographic location. We know for certain that by 50,000 years ago such processes were well under way around the Mediterranean, in central and southern Europe, and in Asia, regions where Homo sapiens was present, though not without the company of Neanderthals. This was long after Homo sapiens first appeared, about 200,000 years ago or earlier. 3 Thus we can think of the beginnings of human cultures as occurring among hunter-gatherers, well before the cultural invention known as agriculture, about 12,000 years ago, and before the invention of writing and money. The dates by which writing systems emerged in varied places are a good illustration of how multicentered were the processes of cultural evolution. Writing was first developed in Sumer (in Mesopotamia) and in Egypt, between 3500 and 3200 B.C. But a different writing system was later developed in Phoenicia and eventually used by Greeks and Romans. About 600 B.C., writing also developed independently in Mesoamerica, under the Mayan civilization, in the region of contemporary Mexico. We can thank Cicero and ancient Rome for the word “culture” applied to the universe of ideas. Cicero used the term to describe the cultivation of the soul—cultura animi—and he must have been thinking of the tilling of the land and its result, the perfecting and improvement of plant growth. What applied to the land might as well apply to the mind. There is little doubt about the principal meaning of the word “culture” today. Dictionaries tell us that “culture” refers to manifestations of intellectual achievement regarded collectively, and unless otherwise specified, the word refers to human culture. The arts, philosophical inquiry, religious beliefs, moral faculties, justice, political governance, economic institutions—markets, banks—technology, and science are the main categories of endeavor and achievement that are conveyed by the word “culture.” The ideas, attitudes, customs, manners, practices, and institutions that distinguish one social group from another belong to the overall scope of culture as does the notion that cultures are transmitted across peoples and generations by language and by the very objects and rituals that the cultures created in the first place.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  Wars constitute a special case because they can prompt both constructive remedies and endless cycles of violence begetting violence. There is nothing to be added to what Homer, the Mahabharata, and Shakespeare’s history plays illustrate on this issue. Whether homeostasis is approached from the solace and consolation angle or from the benefits produced by collective organization and sociability, religion and homeostasis can be persuasively linked in terms of their origins and historical endurance, the latter being indicative of robust cultural selection. I suspect that Émile Durkheim—who placed the roots of religion in collective rituals of tribal peoples rather than in the assuaging of individual or small group sufferings—might agree. Such collective behaviors, as Durkheim commented, unleashed powerful, rewarding emotions and feelings. The collective behaviors of Durkheim’s tribal peoples, however, are likely to have been prompted by homeostatic instabilities in the first place. The homeostatically stabilizing outcome for the individuals in the group would still apply. Karl Marx is supposed to have talked about religion as “the opium of the masses” (although he did not quite say that; he said, instead, that religion was “the opium of the people,” the “masses” probably being a post-Leninist retrofit). What could be more homeostatically inspired than the notion of prescribing opioids to treat human pain and suffering? Marx also wrote, in advance of that famous sentence, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” Here is an interesting mixture of social analysis and probing scrutiny of the cultural mind. It combines his rejection of religion with the pragmatic recognition that religion can be a soulful refuge in a dehumanized and soulless world. Noteworthy, considering that Marx had no idea of how dehumanized and soulless the world would become, especially the world he was responsible for inspiring. Noteworthy most of all because of the transparent linkage of life state, feelings, and cultural responses. 11 The fact that the history of religions is rife with episodes in which religious beliefs led and still lead to suffering, violence, and wars, hardly humanly desirable outcomes, in no way contradicts the homeostatic value that such beliefs did have and clearly still have for a large part of humanity. Finally, just as in the case of artistic endeavors, I need to make clear that I do not see religions as mere therapeutic responses. That the initial motivation of religious beliefs and practices was related to homeostatic compensation is both plausible and likely. How such early attempts evolved is another matter. The intellectual constructions that followed have gone beyond the goal of consolation to serve as instruments of inquiry and formulation of meaning where the compensation element is only a vestige. Practical goals were followed by philosophical explorations of the meaning of humans and universe.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  He could be chilling in the pulpit and indescribably cruel in his personal life and he was certainly the most bitter man I have ever met; yet it must be said that there was something else in him, buried in him, which lent him his tremendous power and, even, a rather crushing charm. It had something to do with his blackness, I think—he was very black—with his blackness and his beauty, and with the fact that he knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful. He claimed to be proud of his blackness but it had also been the cause of much humiliation and it had fixed bleak boundaries to his life. He was not a young man when we were growing up and he had already suffered many kinds of ruin; in his outrageously demanding and protective way he loved his children, who were black like him and menaced, like him; and all these things sometimes showed in his face when he tried, never to my knowledge with any success, to establish contact with any of us. When he took one of his children on his knee to play, the child always became fretful and began to cry; when he tried to help one of us with our homework the absolutely unabating tension which emanated from him caused our minds and our tongues to become paralyzed, so that he, scarcely knowing why, flew into a rage and the child, not knowing why, was punished. If it ever entered his head to bring a surprise home for his children, it was, almost unfailingly, the wrong surprise and even the big watermelons he often brought home on his back in the summertime led to the most appalling scenes. I do not remember, in all those years, that one of his children was ever glad to see him come home. From what I was able to gather of his early life, it seemed that this inability to establish contact with other people had always marked him and had been one of the things which had driven him out of New Orleans. There was something in him, therefore, groping and tentative, which was never expressed and which was buried with him. One saw it most clearly when he was facing new people and hoping to impress them. But he never did, not for long. We went from church to smaller and more improbable church, he found himself in less and less demand as a minister, and by the time he died none of his friends had come to see him for a long time.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  sneaked a glance into the street. The squirrel hadn’t moved. It looked like a scarf someone had dropped. When my mother got home from work I told her there was a dead squirrel in the street. Like me, she was an animal lover. She took a cellophane bag off a loaf of bread and we went outside and looked at the squirrel. “Poor little thing,” she said. She stuck her hand in the wrapper and picked up the squirrel, then pulled the bag inside out away from her hand. We buried it behind our building under a cross made of popsicle sticks, and I blubbered the whole time. I blubbered again in bed that night. At last I got out of bed and knelt down and did an imitation of somebody praying, and then I did an imitation of somebody receiving divine reassurance and inspiration. I stopped crying. I smiled to myself and forced a feeling of warmth into my chest. Then I climbed back in bed and looked up at the ceiling with a blissful expression until I went to sleep. For several days I stayed away from the apartment at times when I knew I’d be alone there. I resumed my old patrol around the city or fooled around with my Mormon friends. One of these was a boy who’d caught everyone’s notice on the first day of school by yelling, when a classmate named Boone had his name read out, “Hey!—any relation to Daniel?” His own name was called soon after, and this turned out to be Crockett. He seemed puzzled by the hoots of laughter that followed. Not angry, just puzzled. His father was a jocular man who liked children and used to take mobs of us swimming at the Y and to youth concerts given by the Tabernacle Choir. Mr. Crockett later became a justice of the state supreme court, the same one that granted Gary Gilmore his wish to die. Though I avoided the apartment, I could not shake the idea that sooner or later I would get the rifle out again. All my images of myself as I wished to be were images of myself armed. Because I did not know who I was, any image of myself, no matter how grotesque, had power over me. This much I understand now. But the man can give no help to the boy, not in this matter nor in those that follow. The boy moves always out of reach. One afternoon I walked a friend of my mine to his house. After he went inside I sat on his steps for a while, then got to my feet and started toward home, walking fast. The apartment was empty. I took the rifle out and cleaned it. Put it back. Ate a sandwich. Took the rifle out again. Though I didn’t load it, I did turn the lights off and pull down the shades and assume my position on the couch. I stayed away for several days after that. Then I came back again. For an hour or so I aimed at people passing by. Again I teased myself by leaving the rifle

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  She turned to look at John, who was grimly destroying the square, tasselled doilies that decorated Florence’s easy chair. ‘I reckon that’s the truth. Look like it go around once, and that’s that. You miss it, and you’s fixed for fair.’ ‘Now you sound,’ said Florence, ‘mighty sad all of a sudden. What’s the matter with you?’ ‘Nothing,’ she said. She turned back to the table. Then, helplessly, and thinking that she must not say too much: ‘I was just thinking about this boy here, what’s going to happen to him, how I’m going to raise him, in this awful city all by myself.’ ‘But you ain’t fixing, is you,’ asked Florence, ‘to stay single all your days? You’s a right young girl, and a right pretty girl. I wouldn’t be in no hurry if I was you to find no new husband. I don’t believe the nigger’s been born what knows how to treat a woman right. You got time, honey, so take your time.’ ‘I ain’t,’ said Elizabeth, quietly, ‘got so much time.’ She could not stop herself; though something warned her to hold her peace, the words poured out. ‘You see this wedding ring? Well, I bought this ring myself. This boy ain’t got no daddy.’ Now she had said it: the words could not be called back. And she felt, as she sat, trembling, at Florence’s table, a reckless, pained relief. Florence stared at her with a pity so intense that it resembled anger. She looked at John, and then back at Elizabeth. ‘You poor thing,’ said Florence, leaning back in her chair, her face still filled with this strange, brooding fury, ‘you is had a time, ain’t you?’ ‘I was scared, ’ Elizabeth brought out, shivering, still compelled to speak. ‘I ain’t never,’ said Florence, ‘seen it to fail. Look like ain’t no woman born what don’t get walked over by some no-count man. Look like ain’t no woman nowhere but ain’t been dragged down in the dirt by some man, and left there, too, while he go on about his business.’ Elizabeth sat at the table, numb, with nothing more to say. ‘What he do,’ asked Florence, finally, ‘run off and leave you?’ ‘Oh, no,’ cried Elizabeth, quickly, and the tears sprang to her eyes, ‘he weren’t like that! He died, just like I say—he got in trouble, and he died—a long time before this boy was born.’ She began to weep with the same helplessness with which she had been speaking. Florence rose and came over to Elizabeth, holding Elizabeth’s head against her breast. ‘He wouldn’t never of left me,’ said Elizabeth, ‘but he died. ’ And now she wept, after her long austerity, as though she would never be able to stop. ‘Hush now,’ said Florence, gently, ‘hush now. You going to frighten the little fellow.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  Notes of a Native Son Equal in Paris On the 19th of December, in 1949, when I had been living in Paris for a little over a year, I was arrested as a receiver of stolen goods and spent eight days in prison. My arrest came about through an American tourist whom I had met twice in New York, who had been given my name and address and told to look me up. I was then living on the top floor of a ludicrously grim hotel on the rue du Bac, one of those enormous dark, cold, and hideous establishments in which Paris abounds that seem to breathe forth, in their airless, humid, stone-cold halls, the weak light, scurrying chambermaids, and creaking stairs, an odor of gentility long long dead. The place was run by an ancient Frenchman dressed in an elegant black suit which was green with age, who cannot properly be described as bewildered or even as being in a state of shock, since he had really stopped breathing around 1910. There he sat at his desk in the weirdly lit, fantastically furnished lobby, day in and day out, greeting each one of his extremely impoverished and louche lodgers with a stately inclination of the head that he had no doubt been taught in some impossibly remote time was the proper way for a propriétaire to greet his guests. If it had not been for his daughter, an extremely hardheaded tricoteuse—the inclination of her head was chilling and abrupt, like the downbeat of an ax—the hotel would certainly have gone bankrupt long before. It was said that this old man had not gone farther than the door of his hotel for thirty years, which was not at all difficult to believe. He looked as though the daylight would have killed him. I did not, of course, spend much of my time in this palace. The moment I began living in French hotels I understood the necessity of French cafés. This made it rather difficult to look me up, for as soon as I was out of bed I hopefully took notebook and fountain pen off to the upstairs room of the Flore, where I consumed rather a lot of coffee and, as evening approached, rather a lot of alcohol, but did not get much writing done. But one night, in one of the cafés of St.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  That training was meant to last a lifetime.” “And it does,” I concluded. If I had found it impossible to beat the conditioning, why should the nuns find it any easier to adapt? Rebecca and I looked at each other bleakly. There was no need to spell out the implications for us. That, I thought, was the best thing about talking to Rebecca. She knew what it was like, and nobody else really had a clue. “What are you going to do?” I asked. “Oh, my father has got me a job with The Tablet. Nothing much; nothing too onerous. But it will be interesting, I think.” “Is that a good idea?” I asked, startled. I didn’t want to be discouraging, but The Tablet seemed far too depressingly familiar. It is the chief intellectual Catholic journal in Britain. It was, no doubt, a very worthy and, in its own way, even an excellent paper, but frankly I had no desire ever to set eyes on it again, let alone help to produce it. “Isn’t it a little . . . er . . . Catholic?” Rebecca smiled. “Very Catholic indeed. Yes, I know what you mean. But I’m not sure that I could cope with anything more challenging. Not yet, at any rate. No, it will be nice. There’s a tiny office—just three or four of us. It will be quite a little community, in a way. Quite comforting, in fact.” I could see it all: a small enclosed world that viewed everything entirely from the church’s perspective, and whose radius of interest rarely extended beyond Catholic preoccupations. At an instinctive level, I could understand exactly why Rebecca wanted to work for The Tablet, even though I felt it to be a mistake. But it was then that I recalled my conversation with Charlotte. Was I really any better? So we’re leaving,” Jane told me grimly as we left the English Faculty Library and headed for her flat. “It’s definite. Keswick, here we come!” Jane and Mark had married the previous summer, and Mark, who was currently a lecturer in a teachers’ training college in London, had just accepted a promotion in a similar college in the Lake District. And as a good wife, Jane, of course, was going with him . “How do you feel about it?” I asked cautiously. This could mean the end of Jane’s career, or at least of a certain kind of career. Unlike me, Jane had been pegged for stardom. The powers that be wanted to keep her in Oxford. “Not great.” Jane grimaced, until her ebulliently positive nature asserted itself. “But hey—it’s beautiful up there. We’ve rented a lovely old eighteenth-century manor house—it’s even in Pevsner. It’s a mess at the moment. We’ll have to paint it from top to bottom. But when that’s over and Markie has started in college, it will be just the sheep and me. No distractions.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Rebecca was staring ahead, looking, as I knew only too well, into an unimaginable future. She had had a long, slow climb back to health, but though she was now back on her feet and able to do light tasks around the house, she was still painfully thin and could not sit down without a cushion, which she carried around with her as a child might carry a security blanket. Her skin looked transparent; her eyes still appeared enormous. Her whole body had suffered an enormous shock. “I’m leaving the order,” she said again, more to herself than to me, as though trying to convince herself that she really was going to do this. I could hardly say I was surprised. “How do you feel?” I asked. She sighed and huddled into the bulky cardigan she was wearing, cold despite the fact that it was a warm spring day and an electric fire was burning in the grate. “It’s the right thing,” she said slowly. “But I cannot imagine what it will be like. Not to be here. But of course, you know all about that.” I nodded. It would be an insult to offer hearty reassurances, jollily telling her that she would soon find her feet. I had found it almost impossibly difficult after a mere seven years in religious life; Rebecca had been in for twelve, and was leaving in much worse shape than I had. “There’s just no place for me here.” Rebecca poured out more tea. I looked around her room. It used to be one of the students’ rooms, when the convent had been a teachers’ training college. There was a pretty fireplace, an electric kettle, a delicate collection of cups and saucers, and a chenille bedspread. The order had also traveled a long way since I had left. “And I should go soon,” Rebecca went on. “They can’t forgive me, you see.” “For the anorexia?” I asked. She nodded. There was no need to explain. Despite their attempts to seem welcoming when I had arrived that day, I had sensed wariness in the nuns here. They knew what had happened to me, of course, and did not know how to deal with it. Rebecca and I had demonstrated the flaws of the system. The nuns, I knew, were good women, and it must be almost unbearably painful for them to realize that they had damaged us. It is always difficult to forgive people we have harmed. “But it should be different,” I said, gesturing around the room. “From the outside, at least, things have changed so much!” “Yes, it is different. And they know they’ve got to change,” Rebecca said. “But they can’t do it as quickly as they need to. Oh, they can wear different clothes, put us all into bed-sitting-rooms, but inside, they are the same. How can they be anything else?

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  In the very first poem of the sequence, which is printed at the beginning of this book, the verse constantly turns upon itself in repetitions of word, image, and sound. Repeatedly the poet tells us, “I do not hope to turn again,” and yet throughout the poem, he is doing just that, slowly ascending to one new insight after another. And even though he insists that he has abandoned hope, I felt paradoxically encouraged. In my own minor way, I had also given up hope—and yet, Eliot seemed to be saying, that could be the way forward. I too had understood that I could not hope to go back and undo the past. Ever since I had left the convent I had tried to be normal, to be just like everybody else. But I could not be the same as my fellow students. It was now time to give up “desiring this man’s gift” or “that man’s scope” and to refuse any longer to submit to the “usual reign.” At seventeen years old, when I had decided to become a nun, I had opted to be different, and now, whether I liked it or not, I was different. This was not because I was anything special, not because I was uniquely talented or sensitive, but simply because I had voluntarily and wholeheartedly submitted to a regime that had been carefully designed to put me fundamentally at variance with the rest of the world. The system had worked. It may in some ways have been destructive, but like any initiation, it could not be undone. I could not hope “to turn again,” and I must “no longer strive to strive towards” what was normal for other people, whose experience had been dissimilar from my own. But there were other things that I had given up—or perhaps it was truer to say that they had given up on me. It appeared now that I could “not hope to know again” what Eliot called “the infirm glory of the positive hour.” I no longer had a healthy mind that could contemplate the world in a wholly cheerful light. I had found that any such vision was indeed infirm and weak, because I had experienced the horror that lay just beneath our ordinary waking consciousness. Nothing could change that. Even if I never had another panic attack, I would never be able to forget what I had seen. And God had gone too.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  Similarly, the personality which had seemed from a distance to be so large and free had to be dealt with before one could see that, if it was large, it was also inflexible and, for the foreigner, full of strange, high, dusty rooms which could not be inhabited. One had, in short, to come into contact with an alien culture in order to understand that a culture was not a community basket-weaving project, nor yet an act of God; was something neither desirable nor undesirable in itself, being inevitable, being nothing more or less than the recorded and visible effects on a body of people of the vicissitudes with which they had been forced to deal. And their great men are revealed as simply another of these vicissitudes, even if, quite against their will, the brief battle of their great men with them has left them richer. When my American friend left his hotel to move to mine, he took with him, out of pique, a bedsheet belonging to the hotel and put it in his suitcase. When he arrived at my hotel I borrowed the sheet, since my own were filthy and the chambermaid showed no sign of bringing me any clean ones, and put it on my bed. The sheets belonging to my hotel I put out in the hall, congratulating myself on having thus forced on the attention of the Grand Hôtel du Bac the unpleasant state of its linen. Thereafter, since, as it turned out, we kept very different hours—I got up at noon, when, as I gathered by meeting him on the stairs one day, he was only just getting in—my new-found friend and I saw very little of each other. On the evening of the 19th I was sitting thinking melancholy thoughts about Christmas and staring at the walls of my room. I imagine that I had sold something or that someone had sent me a Christmas present, for I remember that I had a little money. In those days in Paris, though I floated, so to speak, on a sea of acquaintances, I knew almost no one. Many people were eliminated from my orbit by virtue of the fact that they had more money than I did, which placed me, in my own eyes, in the humiliating role of a free-loader; and other people were eliminated by virtue of the fact that they enjoyed their poverty, shrilly insisting that this wretched round of hotel rooms, bad food, humiliating concierges, and unpaid bills was the Great Adventure. It couldn’t, however, for me, end soon enough, this Great Adventure; there was a real question in my mind as to which would end soonest, the Great Adventure or me.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It would be a long time before I could hear the words “Tennyson,” “doctorate,” or “thesis” without pain. I was not angry with Alastair Courtney. I suspected that, for all the fuss, he had been right. I was no good, and he had unmasked me. I had failed as a nun; I had failed as an academic. I was cracking up mentally. I could not see what I could usefully do with the rest of my life. As I traveled between the college and my flat, the city seemed to mirror my depression. SAME THING DAY AFTER DAY, read a famous graffito snaking between the Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park tube stations. TUBE—WORK—DINER [ sic ]—WORK—TUBE— ARMCHAIR—TUBE—WORK—HOW MUCH MORE CAN YOU TAKE—ONE IN FIVE CRACKS UP. Nineteen seventy-five was a grim year in London. Britain was in recession, the IRA had brought its terror campaign to the mainland, and the tabloid newspapers were apocalyptic, calling for a return to law and order. The unemployment figures were among the worst since the Second World War, and I took perverse consolation from the fact that even if I had got my doctorate, I probably wouldn’t have got a university post. The colorful interlude of the sixties was over. The hippie commune had been replaced by the “squat,” an ideological protest against the futility and absurdity of work, and the young seemed afflicted by what was termed “a poverty of desire.” The dream of a brave new world, which had seemed almost palpable during my Oxford years, was over. Yet despite my depression and my fear for the future, I could not quite succumb to the prevailing despair. The worst had happened, but that meant that I no longer had anything much to lose, and increasingly I found that quite liberating. I had recently moved from my Highgate flat into the house of a college acquaintance in West Finchley. Her husband, Barrie, had died, almost overnight, of viral pneumonia, at the age of twenty-six. Susan had been six weeks pregnant at the time of his death and decided that she did not want to live alone. Her tragedy put my own woes into perspective, and Susan was also a marvelous support to me. Together we looked forward to the baby, and when her daughter was born later that summer, I helped to look after her, changing nappies and even getting up to do the night feed. Susan’s Jewish family generously welcomed me into their midst. Neither Susan nor her parents were believers, but they did have family dinners on Fridays, and I was introduced to chopped liver and challah. On the baby’s naming day, I attended my first synagogue service. Sitting in the women’s gallery, watching the men below transformed by their white prayer shawls, and listening to the strange chant, I was aware that this was quite different from any religion that I had experienced. People talked throughout the service, taking apparently little heed of the long Hebrew readings and prayers.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  desert to shoot at cans and look for ore. He’d caught the uranium bug from my mother. Roy rarely spoke on these trips. Every so often he would look at me and smile, then look away again. He seemed always deep in thought, staring at the road through mirrored sunglasses, the wind ruffling the perfect waves of his hair. Roy was handsome in the conventional way that appeals to boys. He had a tattoo. He’d been to war and kept a kind of silence about it that was full of heroic implication. He was graceful in his movements. He could fix the Jeep if he had to, though he preferred to drive halfway across Utah to a mechanic he’d heard about from some loudmouth in a bar. He was an expert hunter who always got his buck. He taught both my mother and me to shoot, taught my mother so well that she became a better shot than he was—a real deadeye. My mother didn’t tell me what went on between her and Roy, the threats and occasional brutality with which he held her in place. She was the same as ever with me, full of schemes and quick to laugh. Only now and then there came a night when she couldn’t do anything but sit and cry, and then I comforted her, but I never knew her reasons. When these nights were over I put them from my mind. If there were other signs, I didn’t see them. Roy’s strangeness and the strangeness of our life with him had, over the years, become ordinary to me. I thought Roy was what a man should be. My mother must have thought so too, once. I believed that I should like him, and pretended to myself that I did like him, even to the point of seeking out his company. He turned on me just one time. I had discovered that my mother’s cooking oil glowed like phosphorus under the black light, the way uranium was supposed to, and one day I splashed it all over some rocks we’d brought in. Roy got pretty worked up when he looked at them. I had to tell him why I was laughing so hard, and he didn’t take it well. He gave me a hard, mean look. He stood there for a while, just holding me with this look, and finally he said, “That’s not funny,” and didn’t speak to me again the rest of the night. On our way back from the desert Roy would park near the insurance company where my mother, after learning that Kennecott really was out on strike, had found work as a secretary. He waited outside until she got off work. Then he followed her home, idling along the road, here and there pulling into a driveway to let her get ahead, then pulling out again to keep her in sight. If my mother had ever glanced behind her she would have spotted the Jeep immediately. But she didn’t. She walked along in her crisp military stride, shoulders braced, head erect, and never looked back. Roy acted as though this were a game we were all

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  As I rose to my feet, cold with embarrassment, I realized that my reactions were entirely different from those of most of my contemporaries in this strange new world. Perhaps they always would be. But there may have been another reason why I kissed the ground that evening. Ever since my dispensation had come through, many of my fellow students and tutors had made a point of congratulating me. “You must be so relieved to be out of all that!” one of them had said. “It never seemed quite right for you.” “How exciting!” others had exclaimed. “You can start all over again! You can do anything, be anything you want to be! Everything is ahead of you!” It was true, in a sense: now I could fall in love, wear beautiful clothes, travel, make a lot of money—all the things that, most people presumed, I had been yearning to do for the past seven years. But I didn’t feel excited or relieved. I didn’t want to do any of the things that people expected. I had no sense of boundless opportunity. Instead I felt, quite simply, sad, and was constantly wracked by a very great regret. When I pictured that dedicated Lenten scene in the convent, it seemed unbearably poignant because it was now closed to me forever. I mourned the loss of an ideal and the absence of dedication from my new life, and I also had a nagging suspicion that if only I had tried just a little bit harder, I would not have had to leave. There had been something missing in me. I had failed to make a gift of myself to God. And so I felt like a penitent, and perhaps, when I kissed the floor that night, I had unconsciously wanted—just once—to appear in my true colors to the rest of the world. In Beginning the World I described how I had threaded my way through the tables, flinching from the curious gaze of the other students, until I was rescued by a group who had become my friends and who had kept a kindly but tactful eye on me during the past difficult weeks. There was Rosemary, a cheerful extrovert, who was reading modern languages; Fiona, a gentler, more thoughtful girl; her constant companion, Pat, who had been a pupil at one of the boarding schools run by my order; and finally Jane, who was also reading English. All were Catholics. All had some experience of nuns.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I crossed the Continental Divide. While we were waiting for it to cool we heard, from somewhere above us, the bawling of an airhorn. The sound got louder and then a big truck came around the corner and shot past us into the next curve, its trailer shimmying wildly. We stared after it. “Oh, Toby,” my mother said, “he’s lost his brakes.” The sound of the horn grew distant, then faded in the wind that sighed in the trees all around us. By the time we got there, quite a few people were standing along the cliff where the truck went over. It had smashed through the guardrails and fallen hundreds of feet through empty space to the river below, where it lay on its back among the boulders. It looked pitifully small. A stream of thick black smoke rose from the cab, feathering out in the wind. My mother asked whether anyone had gone to report the accident. Someone had. We stood with the others at the cliff’s edge. Nobody spoke. My mother put her arm around my shoulder. For the rest of the day she kept looking over at me, touching me, brushing back my hair. I saw that the time was right to make a play for souvenirs. I knew she had no money for them, and I had tried not to ask, but now that her guard was down I couldn’t help myself. When we pulled out of Grand Junction I owned a beaded Indian belt, beaded moccasins, and a bronze horse with a removable, tooled-leather saddle. IT WAS 1955 and we were driving from Florida to Utah, to get away from a man my mother was afraid of and to get rich on uranium. We were going to change our luck. We’d left Sarasota in the dead of summer, right after my tenth birthday, and headed West under low flickering skies that turned black and exploded and cleared just long enough to leave the air gauzy with steam. We drove through

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  And no doubt future Christianity will find our contemporary dispute between Christian conservatives and Christian liberals equally irrelevant in the long term. Still, there have always been martyrs willing to die for one side or the other. But there have usually been very few who, like Paul, gave their lives in an attempt to hold both together in Christian unity. Finally, then, we give the last word to Paul himself, speaking about what was ultimately to be that fatal great collection for James’s utopian community at Jerusalem. “I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you,” he says in 2 Corinthians 8:13–14, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance. We cite that text as applying not just to the original situation of Paul’s collection, but to the present situation of our modern world. It is, then, now, and always, about “a fair balance,” or a distributive justice, in which God’s family all get an equitable share of God’s world. Notes NOTES Chapter One Paul: Appealing or Appalling? 1. Adolf Gustav Deissman, trans. William E. Wilson, Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History (New York: Harper & Row [Harper Torchbooks], 1957), pp. 80, 140. Chapter Three The Life of a Long-Distance Apostle 1. William Mitchell Ramsay, The Cities of St. Paul (New York: Hodder & Stoughton [Doran], 1907), p. 235. 2. William Mitchell Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveler and the Roman Citizen (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1895), p. 60. 3. Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveler and the Roman Citizen, p. 61. 4. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), pp. 147–62. 5. Stark, Rise of Christianity, p. 160. Index of Scriptures INDEX OF SCRIPTURES Note: Entries in this index, carried over verbatim from the print edition of this title, are unlikely to correspond to the pagination of any given e-book reader. However, entries in this index, and other terms, may be easily located by using the search feature of your e-book reader.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  First, in preindustrial society about one-third of those surviving birth were dead by six, two-thirds by sixteen, and three-quarters by twenty-six years of age. In the ancient world and in all those places where the modern world is still ancient, death is not life’s future and distant end, but its present and constant companion. Even apart from death by the famine and plague of war, there was death from disease, malnutrition, and exhaustion caused by injustice. Christ’s “death” always meant for Paul the terrible death of an unjust execution, the horrible death of a shameful crucifixion. It did not mean death as the normal end of life. His theology was not built on Christ’s death and resurrection as if Christ had died at home in Nazareth and rose there on the third day. Christ’s death was the result of injustice and violence. Here, then, after two thousand years and especially as the twentieth-first century’s terrorism replaces the twentieth century’s totalitarianism, we ask this question. Is it death or is it violence that is the last enemy of God? Or, better, is it unjust and violent death that is the last enemy of God? THE GROANING OF CREATION Paul’s vision in Roman 1–8 concerns the unity of Greeks and Jews, that is, of all people, in a transformed world of global peace. But the vision of imperial Rome was also about the unity of all people in a transformed world of global peace. The confrontation is not, therefore, about ends, but about means. Is that final consummation to come as peace through violent victory and pacification or as peace through nonviolent justice and justification? We ourselves might not consider the distinction between Gentiles and Jews the or even a major division of the global family. We might think of the haves and the have-nots, of the First World and the Third World, of those who have more than they need and those who can barely survive. But, in any case, it is and always will be about the world. So Paul concludes this section with a magnificent hymn not just to our freedom but to that of creation itself: For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (Rom.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, because we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church. Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband. (Eph. 5:25–33) You will notice that wives and husbands get one verse each in Colossians, but in Ephesians the ratio is three to nine. That would indicate that husbands are the greater problem in the second of those two pseudo-Pauline letters. Furthermore, Ephesians places a far heavier burden on husbands than on wives. For wives to obey their husbands as the church does Christ is surely easier than for husbands to sacrifice themselves for their wives as Christ did for the church. That latter injunction probably means that, if there is a religious persecution, husbands must be ready to die if that would save their wives. It is surely sad that subsequent Christian tradition demanded subjection from wives and then, rather than demanding self-sacrifice from husbands, transferred that to wives as well. THE REACTIONARY PAUL ON PATRIARCHY In what scholars call the pastoral letters, Timothy and Titus are imagined as left by Paul in charge of Ephesus and Crete, respectively. The subject of female leadership within the Christian assembly arises in a letter of pseudo-Paul to Timothy, and in this (in)famous text it is absolutely forbidden: Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty. (1 Tim. 2:11–15) We call this passage “reactionary” and not just “conservative,” because it is clearly reacting to what has been happening. There would be no reason to forbid what nobody had ever imagined. There is, for example, no Roman decree forbidding female senators, because nobody ever imagined that possibility, let alone practiced it. There is, however, one other text on the subject of female leadership from an authentic Pauline letter that requires careful discussion, lest our claims about it seem like special pleading. Scholars have suggested that certain units within the seven original Pauline letters were inserted at a later date. But this is only considered persuasive within scholarship if certain criteria are met. Here are the main ones.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  THE CONSERVATIVE PAUL ON SLAVERY Imagine, for a moment, the domestic situation when Onesimus arrived home with that letter for Philemon and announced that there was good news and bad news or, better, that the good news for him was bad news for his owner. (We do not, by the way, presume that their city was Colossae, despite the pseudo-Pauline letter to the Colossians, 4:9). Onesimus’s liberation could not have been kept a secret. What if Philemon had other slaves—would there have been an immediate mass conversion to Christianity? What rumors would have spread throughout the slave infrastructure of their village or city about Christians? Critics could easily have accused Christians—unfairly, but maybe inevitably—of advising slaves to flee their owners or even murder them in their beds. Still, even granted all of that, it is surely sad that the radical Paul of the letter to Philemon was so swiftly and thoroughly sanitized into the conservative Paul of Colossians and Ephesians. In both those books, pseudo-Paul addresses Christian slaves and Christian slave owners and thereby depicts those relationships as perfectly normal. Here are the texts, with Ephesians probably based on Colossians: Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ. For the wrongdoer will be paid back for whatever wrong has been done, and there is no partiality. Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, for you know that you also have a Master in heaven. (Col. 3:22–4:1) Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart. Render service with enthusiasm, as to the Lord and not to men and women, knowing that whatever good we do, we will receive the same again from the Lord, whether we are slaves or free. And, masters, do the same to them. Stop threatening them, for you know that both of you have the same Master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality. (Eph. 6:5–9) You will notice, by the way, that the ratio of advice for slaves to advice for owners is four to one. With regard to the Christian community envisioned by the radical Paul, those texts are contradictory, conservative, and regressive. They are not just post-Pauline; they are anti-Pauline. With regard to the norms of Roman society, they might even be too liberal. First of all, they advocate reciprocal duties for slaves and owners—even granted that four-to-one ratio. Second, Paul directly addresses slaves as well as owners, and Roman slave owners would never accept that interference with their property.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  THE REACTIONARY PAUL ON SLAVERY Even the residual vestige of what Roman slave owners might find too liberal rather than appropriately conservative in Colossians and Ephesians is completely eliminated in the letter to Titus: Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to talk back, not to pilfer, but to show complete and perfect fidelity, so that in everything they may be an ornament to the doctrine of God our Savior. (2:9) There is nothing there about any mutuality of obligations for slaves and masters. And there is nothing addressed directly to slaves. There is but a single verse, and it begins, “Tell slaves.” SLAVERY AND PATRIARCHY You can now see clearly—in the test case of slavery—how the radical Paul of the certainly Pauline letters is transmuted first into the conservative Paul of the probably not, or disputed, Pauline letters and finally into the reactionary Paul of the certainly not Pauline letters. How sad, how terribly, terribly sad. Here is our final question for this chapter. Is the radical Paul’s view of slavery along with its deradicalization in the post-Pauline conservative-to-reactionary tradition a unique, special, or individual case? Is the story told in the letter of Philemon simply an isolated, very personal situation between Paul, Philemon, and Onesimus? Our answer is emphatically negative, because we find exactly that same process with regard to patriarchy. Paul’s radicality, in other words, is not simply about slavery or even about patriarchy. It is about Paul’s radical repudiation—within Christianity—of the normal hierarchical presuppositions of Roman imperial society. Watch, therefore, how, as with slavery, the radical Paul is transformed into, first, a conservative and, then, a reactionary pseudo-Paul with regard to patriarchy. THE RADICAL PAUL ON PATRIARCHY Paul’s vision of gender equality extends from wife and husband within the Christian family to female and male within the Christian assembly and especially within the Christian apostolate. It involves, in other words, all aspects of Christian life. Equality in the family. Paul himself was an ascetic celibate and may indeed have already been one in his pre-Christian practice of Judaism—at least he never mentions Jesus as a model for abnegation of that portion of the world’s normal social relations. In 1 Corinthians he tells his converts that “I wish that all were as I myself am” (7:7a). Still, he never suggests that every Christian is called to celibacy: “Each has a particular gift from God, one having one kind and another a different kind” (7:7b). As reason for such celibacy he mentions the “impending crisis,” in which “the appointed time has grown short” and “the present form of this world is passing away” (7:26–31).